STAR TREK: THE UNDISCOVERED NOMENCLATURE

Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman feel like the most omnipresent writers in the industry. Part of it is how many geektastic projects they’re on, but part of it is also their willingness to talk, talk, talk. How long before they’re directing?

The latest place that the duo yap is a Fox Movie Channel show, Life After Film School. They’re on the show to flog the Fox show Fringe, but the preview clip is all about… Paramount’s Star Trek! Fox knows how to get the eyeballs, I guess.

They discuss the Star Trek canon, but first they go out of their way to say that this film, while it features the earliest days of the Enterprise crew from the original series, is not a prequel. And you know what? They’re sort of right. In fact, Star Trek blows through all the paradigms that we have for film franchises. Here’s why:

The movie begins in the Star Trek present – some time in the The Next Generation timeline. Romulans head back in time, either to kill Kirk or his father (or both, just to be safe. This is known as “The Terminator Gambit”) and Spock follows them into the past, back when the Enterprise crew were young. These events change the history of the Trek universe, either creating a parallel timeline that the films will now follow or simply overwriting everything else that we know as Trek history.

So this is a sequel, a prequel and a reboot all in one package. That makes this film the geekiest movie in history, I believe – prior to this, only comic books felt the need to make reboots and retcons story points in such a major way. JJ Abrams’ Star Trek is the movie equivalent of DC Comics’ Crisis on Infinite Earths – a story that acknowledges the old continuity while creating a new one. This is the sort of obsessive compulsive stuff that is like catnip to us nerds.

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